Give Me Strength

Geez we’re a nation of fuckwits aren’t we?

Not all of us mind you, just the ones who, when they hear of a tsunami warning, run down to the beach rather than away from it. Oh sure, they have all seen the footage of just what a tsunami can do, like what happened in Samoa recently and in Thailand on Boxing Day 2004, but who cares? It is as if they believe that would never happen here in New Zealand and just in case it does these wasters want to be there so they can post the pics of them drowning on their Friendbook pages...

Is this what we’ve become? The land that common sense forgot? We used to be a country of down to earth, humble, hard men and even harder women. Back then we used to only send athletes to the Olympic Games if they were certain to win something, now we don’t even let a small thing like being 47th in the world at something come in the way of that particular honour.

That was in the days when we sent fellas like all round hard man Ian ‘Ferg’ Ferguson to the Olympics and he knows a thing or two about winning medals; he is NZs most successful Olympian with four golds and silver. His son on the other hand, did absolutely nothing when he went to the last summer Olympics but let’s not dwell on that.

Last week Ferg questioned the value of sending athletes to an Olympics (either summer or winter) when they don’t stand a shit show of making the top ten in their discipline and I for one agree with him. The Winter Olympics may give the impression of being one swinging hot tub party at the end of the day, but the athletes there represent the best in the world and if you don’t go thinking you can compete with them why even go?

It probably doesn’t help sway Ferg and I that most of the Kiwi athletes in Vancouver at the moment all come across as stoned surfers when interviewed. In fact most of them seem to be new to their respective speciality which they all appear to have stumbled across whilst on a mega piss mission that was occasionally interrupted by a spot of skiing.

I am not a fan of sending athletes just to make up the numbers under the guise of ‘gaining experience’. Don’t these kids get enough of that when competing between Olympic events? And as for the theory that they do not get enough top level competition I say why the hell not? Are we not constantly being told how mega our ski fields are and how thousands of pastry eating Scandinavians come to visit in their off season?

Maybe it’s just me but I feel that way about a lot of things we send athletes to. Even the All Whites who are on a complete hiding to nothing this year when they rock up to the World Cup finals in South Africa.

Only team sports have a way of giving even the dark horses a chance because teams, even the world’s best, can have their off days and when you only have three group games deciding your fate then one unpredicted result can really fuck it up for everybody.

Now some might say that same argument could be applied to solo sports like say, skiing, still, the athlete needs to give them self every chance of capitalising on it should it happen. But when you’re ranked something silly like 25th in the world you’re really holding out for at least twenty people above you to have one hell of a bad hair day before you even get close to being in the medals. That’s one hell of a big ‘if’.

Honestly? You would have a better chance of seeing fuckwits flocking to watch a tsunami than that ever happening.